Hopes aplenty for former Island High Site

The former home of Island High School, in Alameda's Wedge neighborhood.

The 0.83-acre site that occupies the corner of Eagle Avenue and Everett Street started its developed life as a farm plot tended by a squatter, in the 1800s. And if Melanie Wartenberg and hundreds of her other Alameda neighbors had their way, the site would become an urban farm once again, home to a learning garden, chickens and bees.

Instead the site in the heart of Alameda’s Wedge neighborhood sits vacant, an abandoned shell of a former continuation high school that has been used by the school district and others as a dumping ground and by vagrants seeking refuge in the aging portable classroom buildings that cover much of the cracked, faded asphalt.